Daktari Mother-In-Law

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When I look at my daughter, who says she is “freeee” years old in every sense of the word, I think of my mom and how she has loved me for all my thirty free years.

Our internet has been inoperable for a few days now so I will send my mom a birthday blog.  Although disconnected from the web and facetime and skype, I feel more connected to her when I see Annie and me together.

My mom pinned wings on my soul before I was born.  She was a flight attendant who set out to see the world and she met a handsome and humble former fighter pilot who was settling down for the domesticity of commercial flying.  She told him she was going to marry him and within six months they did. 

My mom sacrificially left her work aside in order to raise little girls at home.  But the wings were still there on her heart.  So she took us all around the world.  She taught us how to see the world. One day in Clayton County she helped out a lady who was walking home from prison.  My mom established mercy and justice in my heart.

My mom would give of herself to care for another, though it cost her dearly.  That, and she likes to dance.  She likes to have fun and water ski and laugh so loud she snorts.  My mom and her mom and my little girl, they all are passionate and wholehearted about what or who they care for.  They don’t do things half way.  You should hear Annie singing in the yard.  You should feel her tiny forceful running hug.

My mom’s mom was a World War II nurse in training who married a handsome and humble service man named Mr. Jolley who would take her dancing and stay faithful his whole life.  My mom found one just like that; minus the dancing.  My dad just took mom flying.  We have some purty lucky ladies in my family.  I pray Annie finds one like her daddy too.

And these women in my line all stand up for what they believe in.  Like it or not.  I don’t know if it’s Southern or just who we are, but at least I know my mom believed in me.  And she never asked me to be someone I was not even when I marched to the beat of my own drum.  Even when I was a typically bad attitude teenager, she didn’t give up on me and persisted in love.  Oh, mom I hope to be strong like you when Annie is stubborn like me.

Once in my year after college I went to Switzerland to try to figure out life before I moved to Africa (the first time).  What I figured out was that I missed home and my mom came to rescue me.  We dipped our little bread in a Swiss fondue in that Alpine village and went back home where everything was all right.

Back to that Georgia dirt in the garden where she stood like an angel in her nightgown among the white blooming spirea of our home as I drove out to meet my next destiny.   That Georgia dirt from which I grew up too.  Sometimes it is just clay but sometimes it is sweet Georgia brown dirt. You planted us with deep roots and a firm foundation.  And you taught me how to see the beauty that comes out of what was once just dirt.  Potential is what my mom looks for.

So last month she and my dad flew around the world to come visit me and my hero husband and their grandchildren.  My baby girl she says, is so much like me.  And we take her out on adventures too.  As we drive through Kenyan farm land, a man as black as the dirt he is hoeing stands bare chested in the field.  I think of Adam, of the ancestor of us all here in Africa.  And how many generations have treated him like the dirt from which God grew him.  But how my mom taught me to see the Image of God breathed into the Adam like life of that black man.  Even when history is wrong, even when the systems of generations is wrong, she helped me to stand tall for what is right.

My mom gives so much of herself to others.  Now I am starting to see it in the mirror and in Annie.  It’s her image poured into us.  She pinned the wings on my soul after all.   

Happy Birthday Mom.